The Strange Rise of the Murder Tourists
Claudette Montrose—better known by the alias Lady Macabre—claims to have always had an uncommon fascination with death. And who could watch even one of her videos to the end and contradict her? A cynic may say the bridal gown streaked with blood she favors in many of her virtual and live appearances is gimmicky, tasteless theater, an attempt to cement her image, consolidate her brand. Yet behind the ostentation of costumes and corpse paint, the sad-doll eye makeup, the array of disquieting tattoos, it’s hard to ignore not only her genuine lust for the most sordid and deranged elements of violence but her flair for turning them into irresistible anecdotes and yarns.
Though not the founder or inventor of the trend, Lady Macabre has been called “the spiritual godmother of murder tourism” and the subculture it has spawned. While one could quibble with the accuracy of the epithet, there can be no doubt that Lady Macabre is not only the movement’s most recognizable spokesperson but, to an impressive degree, the force behind its stunning rise.
A mere five months ago, Lady Macabre was an unknown thirty-one-year-old woman with no particular career objectives, living off a few shrewd investments in cryptocurrencies. She grew up in a small British Columbian town, tucked away between mountains, orchards, and glacier-bound lakes. Her mother was a music teacher, her father a minister in an Anglican church. Though an obedient child, if a little on the dreamy side, adolescence brought on a spell of insurmountable gloom. She found herself “on chilly terms with God,” eschewing her father’s temple and Christian lore for the novels and tales of H.P. Lovecraft and the other dark apostles of supernatural horror.
After high school she deserted her parents’ insular nest in the mountains and hitchhiked to Vancouver, bussing at an upscale Indian restaurant for the summer before enrolling at the University of British Columbia. She rambled her way through her university years, reading with abandon, though somehow failing to pick up a degree, made a fleeting attempt at breaking into journalism, and then tried to muster the superhuman patience required to be a novelist. She gave up the last of these endeavors saying she was ill-suited to become “a gremlin perched at a laptop.”
There were other failed experiments and jettisoned projects—apprenticeships, online business courses, romantic entanglements, even some short but intense jags of addiction to darknet pharmaceuticals. Eighteen months ago, following a stay in a rehabilitation center, she replied to an ad for a room in a twenty-fifth-floor apartment in Toronto. The man who put up the ad, Lars Hornbacher, would in a relatively quick interval become Macabre’s most devout confidante. A few facts about Hornbacher before we proceed to our main line of inquiry. Having appeared alongside Lady Macabre on at least three occasions, we can say that he cuts a nondescript figure, especially through contrast with his female counterpart. His wardrobe consists of a jean-jacket and chinos, blue and gray forgettable attire. The baseball hat he invariably wears is useful not for being a symbol of his fidelity to any sports franchise but in eliminating the vexing problem of how to style his hair.
In those early days, Hornbacher was an indispensable accomplice given that he was conveniently available and owned a car. Prior to meeting Macabre, Hornbacher had no great love affair for the vile and the grotesque. “He wasn’t even necro-curious,” Macabre has quipped. But having been recently laid off from his job as stocker and sorter at an outlet of the Discount Barn, relinquishing his position to what was in effect a robot, he was eager for a new project or diversion to snatch up his time. He was no doubt partly motivated by an infatuation with Macabre, who has said that, though she loves Hornbacher, their romance has been every bit as innocent as the union of Bonnie and Clyde.
Which brings us to their adventures and the phenomenon of murder tourism. Although Macabre initially resisted the term “murder tourists” for being disparaging, and made a half-hearted attempt to rechristen her tribe mortem quaesitors (derived from the Latin for “death seekers”), she now seems to be more accommodating to the dominant vernacular. Some of you will be familiar with murdertracker.com—and newer iterations of the site—but since others, swamped by competing news stories and the inescapable demands of television, will be regrettably ignorant on this topic, let us offer here a cursory description of its features. The site was designed to keep the public informed concerning outbursts of violence in whatever neighborhood and city one happens to live. Enter your address or present location into the search bar and the algorithm generates the most recent murders in your range. You can also choose to see the world or continent map, then watch the murders pour in to the various regions, sitting back and studying the flow of death, the countries and states surging with homicides, the waves of killings emerging in Real Time on your screen. Clicking on a specific murder will illuminate the fundamentals of the case: the name, gender, and age of the victim; the means by which the murder was perpetrated; the time of death; whether the police have a suspect; any other details obtained.
For some years after the site came online, the Murdertracker algorithm was generally neglected. True, some frantic parents, hoping that a few barbarities in their area would assist their efforts to impose a curfew on their children by lending their fears greater legitimacy, were quick to adopt its use. There were also several evangelical spiritual leaders and other advocates of a singular God who were persuaded that the red arrows representing cases on the Murdertracker global map traced the edges of hell’s benighted kingdom on earth. One such video, the so-called “Devil’s Silhouette” clip, was widely distributed on social media and may be the first indication that Murdertracker was about to leak into the zeitgeist.
Some weeks later, “look me up on Murdertracker,” which started as a meme on anonymous message boards like 4chan and similar backwater zones of the internet, spread to more mainstream platforms. This in itself was an odd development since the meme was cryptic, never making it clear whether the “me” of the phrase should be thought of as victim or killer. Meanwhile, fans of horror fiction and those who, like Macabre, were not only drawn to a poetic idealization of death but to an idolatry of everything grim, ugly, and decrepit in its aspect, had begun turning up at the location of these murders. Police were among the first to note the increased presence of spectators at crime scenes featuring some gruesome outcome, the more terrifying and tragic the stronger the allure. The chief of police in Dallas even famously referred to such onlookers as “buzzards,” who would loom just beyond the perimeter of yellow tape, waiting for the analysis of the crime scene to wrap up so they could swoop in and take pictures and bask in an environment that was so recently the backdrop to an abomination.
Even the most vociferous promoters of the community, the most death-enchanted members of the sect, must admit there is a breed of murder tourist who belong to a variation on a particularly obnoxious kind of general tourist, namely the type who plague every historic and scenic metropolis of the world, milling about with cameras, taking photos of sculptures, frescoes, cathedrals, pyramids, and ruins identical to the shots anyone could mindlessly call up with an internet search. But while such tourists are easily the most conspicuous and embarrassing, are they the most representative? Lady Macabre, whose influence on murder tourists is profound, has said that her ambition to arrive promptly to a murder site was never motivated by the prospect of “corpse-gawking.” While catching a glimpse of a desecrated body may be memorable and thrilling, it’s only a bonus, relegated to an auxiliary concern. Instead she has suggested a more mystical origin for her zeal, speculating about “subtle disturbances” to the nature of a building or landscape due to its close proximity or contact with torture. She has spoken of the way “haunted configurations of particles” warp and attack the anatomy of a nearby tree, infecting the area with a certain vibe of rot and menace, even darkening the mood of a house’s facade.
In recent Q and A’s with her supporters, she has alluded to “demonic portals” opening up in space and time. She noted a particular diabolical case in New Jersey where six victims were slain with a machete. “It was like an R-rated movie,” she said. “You read details about this case and you’re thinking this has to be fiction. It’s too insane to be real.” Having visited the place not long after the massacre, though she was barred from the property itself and was restricted to the street view, she was immediately seized by “the witchy imprint of the horror” that was burned into the material record of the site. “There is an echo somewhere of the screams,” she said. “If you quiet your mind, you can hear it. Something wild and vivid lives on in the air.”
Though Macabre and Hornbacher were not the first to travel to murder sites, using coordinates on Murdertracker as their guide, after their inaugural experience, driving a couple of hours to a double stabbing at a celebrated make-out spot overlooking a river, they rapidly developed a fondness for murder tourism that is perhaps unparalleled. Based in Canada’s largest and densest metropolitan area, they were not satisfied merely to stalk the murder sites that proliferated sometimes in Toronto’s downtown alleys, though more often in the cursed boundaries of the sprawl, the zones where shopping plazas and meat factories yield to pastures and stretches of wilderness. No, stimulated by a ravenous need for more cases, the temptation of death just out of reach, they felt compelled to travel beyond the city with greater frequency and latitude. They were lucky—the spring weather was soon an ally to their cause, both improving driving conditions and making crimes and atrocities more prodigious. As is clear from Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare had certainly guessed that fine weather is conducive to roguish gallivanting, territorial skirmishes, and deadly knife fights in the public square.
What at first seemed like an unusual hobby soon evolved into the magnetic core of their lives. Their peregrinations of Ontario tended toward the northeastern sections of the province, occasionally launching them on forays to the mayhem-rich districts in otherwise languorous cities of Quebec. At other moments, they plied the southern tail of Canada, chasing the astonishing number of brutal incidents that saturated the network, and it was during one of these quests, desperate for more slaughter, that they were lured on to cross into the United States, where murder has enjoyed a longer and more revered tradition. Yes, once they were down in New York or Michigan they found themselves in a paradisal situation of surplus and plenitude. Continuously refreshing their search on the website in hope of being among the first to notice a new murder case, giving them a head start over other pilgrims to the scene, they were flooded with so many opportunities they often faced a kind of existential dilemma of having to choose between several options all of which seem equally felicitous. Sometimes one murder would lead to the next in an ever-expanding arc, and a constellation of blood would paint the landscape of North America, a crimson line stretching across the plains to the coastal cities and then twisting downward, a dark and merciless tide of massacres in the South, even more furious in the border towns of Mexico. It was all too easy to be caught up in the frenzy for murder sites. Each time they set foot on the grounds of a shooting or decapitation it was like they were edging closer—closer to some awful epiphany that never quite dawned. Before they even knew what had come over them, bedevilled by the network’s strange attraction, hundreds of miles would float past them in a blur, with hardly a pitstop, hardly a moment to refuel. They would wake up in a motel bed in Evansville, Indiana, or Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and wonder what had possessed them. But after breakfast in a diner, a mass of scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes, several bracing cups of coffee, they were back on the highway, listening to drone metal or retro electronica, cruising through vistas of farmland and cloud, on the prowl for a new tantalizing death.
Outdoor cases, especially those which occurred on public property, had the advantage in facilitating an intimacy with the experience of both murderer and victim. Although the details on Murdertracker were sketched out in the roughest form, Macabre had no trouble fertilizing those spare facts with more colorful material born of her imagination. She and Hornbacher would re-enact the drama in a field or glade in the woods: the victim leaning against a tree, eating a submarine sandwich; the killer sidling up and starting a conversation, casual and jaunty at first, though soon dropping hints that something was worrisomely off. They would recapitulate the deterioration of ominous chatter, transitioning to demands for money and sex. They would mime the victim’s shrieks, the stony-eyed mutilation, the rudimentary attempt to hide the body in the leaves.
Sometimes other tourists would turn up and join in on the playacting. At other moments, the new tourists disputed the chronology of key events, reimagining the antecedents of the crime; they might even wish to challenge the reigning psychological portraits of victim and killer. As a collective they would then attempt to arrive at a consensus on how the drama unfolded. Where narrative cooperation proved impossible, rival factions of murder tourists would be forced to work in bitter isolation, occupying the same space but disconnected in the realm of fantasy.
Because of the popularity of Murdertracker and the subculture that evolved it was almost inevitable that one day a murderer would enter his own case into the network. On the first of August of the previous year, it was clear and humid in southeastern Minnesota. The location was among the more classical murder settings, a destination known to hikers and bird watchers, a woodland area insulating a shallow bog. If the murderer of that unfortunate teenager, Derek Zylbin, was not exactly creative in his deployment of setting or in the mode in which he vanquished his victim’s life—namely by hacking him to pieces with an axe—the way he proceeded in the aftermath of the murder surely was.
Macabre and Hornbacher were the first tourists to reach the destination of Derek Zylbin’s murder. Knowing how recently the case had been added to Murdertracker, they would not have been amazed to encounter a police squad, detectives, forensics experts, coroners, the complete cavalry of officialdom, perhaps even catching sight of the murder weapon itself, with its doomed, magical potency. Instead only one man—we know him as Gerald Slocum—lurked on the scene. In no way an imposing presence, he was as slender as Macabre and much shorter than Hornbacher. Slocum wore a black knitted pullover, gray denim slacks, and leather hiking boots. His hair was a ruddy brown, gleaming with styling mousse, parted to the side. He smiled easily, exhibiting no signs of social awkwardness or interpersonal malaise. He articulated his words with a clarity and deft control of diction that, according to Macabre, was suited to someone with a background in public speaking or radio.
Slocum was the first to bring up the subject of Murdertracker. He wasted little time before confessing to being Derek Zylbin’s executioner, an admission that struck his visitors as highly dubious. Then, while slurping on the fumes of his vape, Slocum offered to produce from the trunk of his van the very axe that had so swiftly and inexorably upended Zylbin’s brief sojourn on earth. Though Macabre and Hornbacher played along, the sight of the bloody axe hardly persuaded them that Slocum was the killer. Perhaps he’d brought along a chicken to slaughter, or had obtained blood from some other deceptive method. Slocum did not appear to be a madman, but what motive did he have for impersonating the murderer? This was not some kind of murder mystery party game. A young man had died only hours ago. The information on Murdertracker had never misled them before.
Despite her skepticism, Macabre was intrigued enough to ask where the body was buried. Delighted by the invitation to retell the murder in broader detail, Slocum guided his visitors several miles on a hike through the wildlife preserve. The trail included some steep switchbacks, making for a sometimes tricky excursion. The chitter of birdsong was uninterrupted. The species of toadstools and other fungi, many of which were poisonous but no less dazzling for being so, crowded the edge of the crooked path. In a patiently self-assured and cadent tone, Slocum narrated the story of Derek Zylbin’s murder, pointing to particular landmarks where crucial moments occurred. Here, by this hollowed out tree trunk, is where he undraped the blindfold from his victim’s eyes. Here, by this relic of a hornet’s nest, he exhorted his victim to make his final prayers to any deity he worshipped. Here, by this patch of ivy, he delivered a series of axe blows to his victim, the final one splitting the young man’s torso as cleanly as a deck of cards.
By the time Slocum and the two murder tourists had threaded their way through thickening swirls of black flies and mosquitoes, arriving at the bog in the heart of the forest maze, though it may have been no later than mid-afternoon, the sun’s power was sufficiently nullified behind the canopy to mistake the hour for dusk. Slocum claimed the mangled corpse of Zylbin lay in the bog, submerged beneath a veil of slime. Hornbacher, who was wearing rubber boots, waded into the swamp water. With the help of Slocum, who directed him to the general area where the corpse was located, he began prodding around with a stick. Macabre has said Hornbacher managed to excavate a few body parts—a leg, a hand, and some other fleshy material less easy to identify. This discovery assured them that Slocum was not lying in all aspects of the case. And yet, right up until DNA tests of the blood stains on Slocum’s axe made his guilt seem all but irrefutable, Macabre and Hornbacher continued to believe Slocum was pretending to be a murderer for some purpose they could not guess. They imagined Zylbin’s murderer to be elsewhere, a fugitive already disappearing into another state, luxuriating in the afterglow of his repulsive deed.
That Macabre delayed before reporting this episode to the police has led her to become a polarizing figure. Several of Macabre’s enemies have even maliciously asserted on X and Murdertracker chatrooms that she and Hornbacher were collaborators in Zylbin’s killing and dismemberment. Yet not a shred of evidence validates this claim. We also know that while Macabre and Hornbacher were enjoying pizza, checking in to the Days Inn, and surfing through cable TV, no less than sixteen individuals, all of them tourists, turned up at the murder site. Slocum was still loitering around the parking lot at the trailhead to the woods. He greeted the new arrivals, offering to take them on a “guided tour,” and soon confessed to the crime as he did with previous visitors. All except one of the tourists accepted his offer. No one, apart from Macabre, seemed to think Slocum’s confession worth mentioning to the authorities.
The subsequent morning, at seven a.m., despite drizzly conditions, two new murder enthusiasts, a middle-aged couple, drove up to the trailhead. Slocum, not quite untidy but certainly less fresh from having passed the night in his van, approached them in the parking lot and was every bit as welcoming to the newcomers as he had been with murder tourists of the previous day. The couple and their guide had just set out on the sloping, muddy trail when the police put an abrupt end to their tour.
Does it matter that the founders of the Murdertracker website, responding to condemnation from the public and media, have now changed the web address numerous times, altering the domain name to Murderchaser, Deathsnooper, and most recently Nightmarehunter? Some incarnation of the site will persist and, undoubtedly, we have not seen our last Gerald Slocum. Still, we would be wrong to attribute to him the same puerile hopes of achieving a legacy of infamy that one might attach to school shooters. Slocum has said that, as a fan of Murdertracker himself, he’d hoped to “intensify the experience, giving it a new layer of depth and interactivity.” Surely some murder tourists appreciated the gesture. Some commentators have said Slocum’s guided tour of the death site is the natural fulfillment of the murder tourism concept, maintaining all the best parts about the practice—the fun of imaginative recreation, the romantic attitude toward death, the creepy mysticism of walking on bewitched ground—while adding a new element of suspicion, a sort of Wes Craven paranoia about who might be the next victim in the series of murders, maybe even you.
At this point, the various comment threads and forums where the murder tourism subculture engages in internal dialogue began to show signs of an emerging identity crisis. Was this really where murder tourism was leading them? To an interactive game in which they convened with murderers and risked getting swallowed up in the sinister drama themselves? Possibly even becoming victims or accessories to the murder? As if in reaction to this hysteria, Gerald Slocum’s conceits were widely repudiated and, indeed, even vilified. Instead, the sad short life of Derek Zylbin was recast as one of a martyr. “DZ sacrificed his life so those lucky nineteen murder tourists could experience an hour of unforgettable joy,” one commentator who calls himself Kronic posted. The notion reverberated throughout large portions of the community. Whatever madness had threatened to deliver them into a fantasy of random barbarism and “altruistic violence”—murders carried out for the enjoyment of spectators—was branded as apostasy, a distortion of the good vision murder tourism embodies. The dark brotherhood Slocum and his followers offered was rejected, driven out to the fringes of the sect.
Lady Macabre certainly helped to reorient the community when she stated that “murder tourism is the most realized method for honoring murder victims that has been devised since Christianity. Maybe ever.” She went on to side with the faction of her tribe inclined to canonize Derek Zylbin when she said, “murder tourism has nothing to do with championing killers.” And, perhaps more poignantly, “without us the victims get shoved aside. It’s like everyone is in a big hurry to forget about the victim, sometimes—you’d be surprised—even the victim’s family. Obviously, we can’t undo their murders, but when we show up not as gawkers but as witnesses, ready to be completely lucid and vulnerable, it’s really a lot more powerful than turning up days later with flowers and moping at someone’s grave.”
Yet Zylbin’s mother has lamented her child’s appropriation as a Christly symbol by a group of “cowardly sadists” and signaled that she aims to become an activist to prevent murder tourism from blooming into a fad. While she has so far failed to realize this end—murder tourism is more popular than ever—it is perhaps an auspicious sign that it was not Slocum who rose to heights of fame following the incident but the fascinating and versatile Lady Macabre. When the phenomenon of murder tourism exploded into the public consciousness with the Zylbin case, some kind of official interpreter was needed, someone who’d herself been seduced by the dangerous fantasy, who resonated with both the sickening cosmology and the spirit of play murder tourism invoked. Someone who understood the gorgeous pleasure of an environment freshly steeped in cruelty and blood. Who recognized the bliss of breathing air, particles of which only hours or minutes ago, may have passed through the lungs of a victim about to be butchered alive. Lady Macabre, meeting all these criteria, emerged as a woman of striking eloquence, social media verve, and the enterprising skills to forge a name for herself as an influencer in the combative marketplace of ideas. Although some observers have labeled her yet another “mere provocateur” and “an apologist for nastiness,” she had the instincts to target a particular niche of the culture, which prior to her had been shadowy and elusive. Her reward is that she now enjoys a kind of devotion from her followers and subscribers normally reserved for esteemed religious figures, elite athletes, and A-list celebrities. This certainly speaks to her connection with her fan base. She has understood them, grasped their numbness, the cold anguish that permeates their bones. She makes no concessions to niceties; her stories are alarming in their candor. Amazingly, while showcasing an expertise on the topic of murder tourism and the all the most legendary cases to occur since the website launched, she never lords her considerable knowledge over her audience and always comes off as inviting and receptive, even with total novices to the field. If she can manage not to succumb to the pressures and burdens associated with her stratospheric rise—and that is indeed a big if—her name may flow from our lips and pens for years to come.
Reportedly, several decorated literary agencies have already made overtures to her and there is talk of a memoir before the year is out. We may not wish to experience murder tourism ourselves. We may be the type who cringes when they hear of neighbors or colleagues admitting they have tried it. But will we not leaf through Lady Macabre’s inevitable memoir looking for the juiciest and most ravishing stories? Sure, if we are feeling sterile, afflicted with ennui for all that is predictable, joyless, and routine we may turn to a horror novel or conjure up Netflix in our living rooms, scouring the catalogue for a psychological thriller we have yet to see. But Lady Macabre and the murder tourists excite and disturb us in their own special way. Is it the pure excitement for reality they stimulate? The youthful thirst for love, the bravery and lack of self-consciousness to plunge into the throes of wild, bittersweet experience? Or are they only chasing another empty simulacrum, the pitiful addicts and tragic seekers of a new mirage?
Lady Macabre has told us that behind each act of bloodshed, each act of monstrous devastation, we may find the secret means to cleanse ourselves, make ourselves new once again. We may never know if she is right until we set out on the road ourselves. There are murders everywhere, countless, haunting, infinitely variable. We have only to open up to the possibility that with every fallen corpse, every slaying in our parks and city squares, something hideous but sacred endures.
MARCUS SPIEGEL”S fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Boulevard, Chicago Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, North American Review, Southwest Review, Santa Monica Review, Sycamore Review, and elsewhere. His short story “A Tale of Two Trolls” won a Pushcart Prize in 2022 (republished in XLVI Edition) and his essay “Blood from a Cactus” was a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2024 Nonfiction Prize. He was born in the plains of Canada, traveled extensively in the Midwest, and currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
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